Gamaliel resigns from the arbitration committee

For this week in the arbitration report: arbitrator Gamaliel resigned from the Committee while a motion has been made about Extended Confirmed protection.

Gamaliel resigns

On 22 May, it was announced that Gamaliel was resigning from the committee. A statement from the committee, written by Arbitrator Opabinia regalis, says:

His resignation comes as the current arbitration case, "Gamaliel and others", is in its proposed decision phase, with the remaining members voting on the outcome. Gamaliel was elected to the committee at the December 2015 elections, where he was ranked 9th, to take up a one-year term. Gamaliel has since retired from Wikipedia altogether.

Extended confirmed protection

On 15 May, the committee passed motions on extended confirmed protection. Also known as the "30/500 rule", the protection level restricts editing rights for certain articles to editors who have made 500 edits and have been registered at least 30 days. Current uses of this level include the GamerGate controversy article, articles on Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, certain articles pertaining to Indian castes and their talk pages, and any page that could be reasonably construed as being related to the Arab–Israeli conflict. The expectations for the use of 30/500 in arbitration enforcement and discretionary sanctions are:

• Extended confirmed protection may only be applied in response to persistent sockpuppetry or continued use of new, disruptive accounts where other methods (such as semi-protection) have not controlled the disruption. This provision does not apply to a page or topic area which has been placed under 30/500 protection by the arbitration committee.
• Administrators are not permitted to remove the extendedconfirmed user group as a discretionary sanction.
• Administrators must not remove the extendedconfirmed user group as means of bypassing defined arbitration enforcement procedures (for example, removing the user group as a normal administrative action to avoid banning an editor from the Gamergate controversy article).